Sam Hardwick's web journal

There appears to have been a prolonged hiatus on this blog. It is mostly due to personal tragedy: a serious (and ongoing) illness in the family first made blogging feel somehow improper, then got me depressed and minimal-minded. I only just realised that’s what it is – I haven’t been feeling particularly sad, it’s more that everything is so difficult to get done and unpleasurable. It’s almost a relief, I can just mope out now. Projecting from current trends, in five years I’ll be an extremely fat, lonely alcoholic with no job or girlfriend and mounting imported beer -related debts.

Maybe that would open up a career in standup comedy. Somewhere deep inside me is a Space Moose -type dysfunctional, offensive psychopath that needs to get out. (There was an interview with a songstress in the paper today; she had their typical way with words and termed a question she refused to answer “unpolitically correct”. That’s me all over.)

One way I know there’s a Space Moose inside me is that people keep disagreeing with me. It used to be that I’d say something insightful and people would mostly agree with me and start exploring the glorious vistas of understanding I had just revealed. Now they say things like “I don’t think you’ve understood this at all”, “That doesn’t make any sense” and “What are you, eleven?” Then I say “I hate you! I hate you!”, run back home and start eating something.

3 Comments on Orson spiral

Something similar happened to me, but I don’t have the charisma of Space Moose.

My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, and then getting high and playing guitar seemed so much easier than writing my M.A. thesis. Mainly I didn’t want to think about anything, so I mindlessly ran scales and arpeggios up and down the neck. Most of the time I was listening to music through headphones, so I wasn’t even paying attention to what I was playing. Thus even though I improved my playing substantially, I had no idea how to apply my new technique.

After my year of smoking weed more or less all day every day, my mom’s tumor started to retreat. She told me she was going back to work. She had overcome cancer and was ready to go back to work, while I wasn’t even close to ready to stop feeling sorry for myself and get to work. By that time I had gained 14kg (you know what they say about marijuana and the munchies–it’s all true); I didn’t feel like doing anything fun, much less writing a thesis; and, moreover, I hadn’t had more than a passing thought about literary theory or philosophy of language for months. I still haven’t started the thesis, and at this point it would be easy to believe that I’m quite a lot stupider than before.

At least you have your charisma to fall back on.

I guess what I learned is that taking a break from life and allowing oneself to get fat and surly is the last thing to do in such cases.

For sure. An unexpected threat of loss will often bring up some kind of hitherto-then hidden psychological weakness / unpreparedness – when I got the bad news I felt personally threatened – but as always in life, there’s no consolation prize for being brought down by it.

I hope you get back to where you want to be, or somewhere even better.